Launched in 2015 as a Buffett Institute “Big Ideas” project, our Global Capitalism and Law research group investigates the political, social, legal, and normative underpinnings of successful and politically sustainable local, national, and global markets. A number of projects that focus on global capitalism and law are in the works or soon appearing.
Ruling the Global Economy: Why is Money so Different from Trade?
A book project with article spin-offs (with Stephen C. Nelson)
Framed as an investigation of divergent legalization in the global regulation of money and trade, this project creates a global history of the current system of global economic governance. Unique elements of this project include: 1) We integrate global governance developments in the regulation of money and trade, two issues areas that are functionally linked yet they have been institutionally (and some would say dysfunctionally) divided between the IMF and the World Trade Organization. These two issue areas have also become siloed areas of study, which is to say that trade experts know little about the governance of money, and visa versa. 2) We investigate both decisions made and not made by examining proposals offered yet not acted upon. We thus see non-decisions–choices to eschew a more legalized or internationally institutionalized form of global governance– as equal in importance to decisions that are made. 3) In uniting siloed trade and monetary global governance developments, we are studying global economic governance as a regime complex. Global structural challenges, such as decolonization, the Cold War, and major economic crises, affected both domains, and there are connector issues such as concerns about balance of payments which lead challenges in one domain (e.g. monetary instability, overvalued currencies etc) to reverberate in other policy domains (e.g. trade). 4) We think about how uncertainty, unknowables, and past concerns shape present and future decision-making. Our account therefore highlights contingencies in choices made, and how decisions and non-decisions in one period of time shapes actions and non-actions at later periods of time.
Global Governance and the Problem of the Second Best
Articles co-authored with Cristina Lafont (Philosophy)
This article–a unique collaboration between political philosophy and empirical analysis–applies the problem of the second best to the subject of global governance reform. The problem of the second best raises a concern about an “approximation trap” where steps intended to move closer to an ideal instead generate outcomes that are worse than the unreformed system. The solution, we argue, is “second-best theorizing,” identifying a package of objectives worth protecting so long as the first-best ideal remains elusive. Our second-best theorizing involves ideal elements that one can approximate, deviant elements that one must defend so long as the ideal is unattainable, a substantive floor so that reforms do not make things worse, and a meta-requirement that wholesale institutional change take the form of a “constructive vote of no-confidence.” We then apply these criteria, suggesting reforms of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Our example of the Kantian ideal, our second-best criteria, and their application to the WTO are real examples. Yet our larger objective is to demonstrate the problem of the second best as it applies to global governance, thus their development is mainly illustrative. Readers need not share either the first or second-best objectives to agree with the larger point. So long as efforts to approximate an ideal (e.g. economic growth, Pareto welfare improvements, etc.) can fall prey to the approximation trap, our endorsement of the superiority of second-best theorizing applies. In fact, one of our goals is to prompt second-best theorizing around a range of proposals to reform the global order, to make global capitalism more normatively defensible and politically sustainable.
The Politics of Backlash in Comparison A special issue and book project (with Michael Zürn, Wissentschaftzentrum Berlin)
Karen J. Alter & Michael Zürn, Conceptualizing Backlash Politics: Introduction to a special issue on backlash politics in comparison, 22 British Journal of Politics and International Relations 563(2020). https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148120947958
Karen J. Alter & Michael Zürn, Theorising Backlash Politics: Conclusion to a special issue on backlash politics in comparison, 22 British Journal of Politics and International Relation 739(2020). https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148120947956
This project moves beyond existing discussion of backlash politics to think about whether there is something distinct and general about backlash politics. With Michael Zürn, we put together a group of diverse political scientists to review a broader set of literatures and issues with the goal of exploring if there is something distinct about a politics of backlash. Our conceptualization of backlash politics three necessary conditions: 1) a retrograde objective; 2) extraordinary goals, methods and tactics; and 3) reaching the threshold of entering public discourse. These necessary elements bring with them frequent companions, including: emotional appeals, rose-colored nostalgia, and negative sentiments such as anger and commitment; the extraordinary objectives often inspire taboo breaking; and when the threshold level of entering public discourse is reached, backlash politics also often leads to the reshaping of institutions through either formal means (e.g. rewriting policies and process to alter future trajectory of politics) or informally (e.g. repurposing or reinterpreting existing rules and processes). The special issue of the British Journal of Politics and International Relations (2020) theorizes further about backlash politics, developing the composite elements and offering illustrations from around the world. This project will be expanded into a book project which will allow deeper empirical investigations, including studies that go further back in time. The project intentionally unites the subfields of American politics, comparative politics, international relations, race and identity politics, and normative theory. We also mix senior and junior scholars, underrepresented scholars, and American and European based scholars.
Contracting v. Multilateralism in Global Economic Governance: Before, During and After the WTO
A book chapter that I will expand into a larger article, to be co-authored with Timothy Meyer
This chapter, for a book focused on the future of the World Trade Organization, discusses three ways that global economic law and corresponding transnational dispute settlement systems have been constructed across time: via private contracting, inter-state contracting, or through principled multilateral-ism. Offering a global capitalism and law perspective, the chapter compares the ideal type of each model to the historical practice, identifying what multilateralism provides that contracting does not. The larger argument is that all three modes of law-making should and will co-exist. We should therefore be thinking about which mode of law-making is best for a particular issue or context, and how we might use the other modes to address problems that arise in each approach. The chapter then considers how contracting can supplant the WTO, and the trade-offs associated with such an outcome.
From Colonial to Multilateral International Law: A Global Capitalism and Law Analysis International Journal of Constitutional Law (I•Con) 19 (3): 798-864, 2021
This invited Forward connects international relations, international law and global history scholarship to understand two global trends in tension with each other: 1) the shift from European colonial dominance to a law-based multilateralism, which enabled a more equal and inclusive international law and 2) global capitalism which across time has been a political and economic force that, left to its own devices, promotes exclusion and inequality. Alter builds an encompassing category of global economic law to show the interplay of colonial law, private law, domestic law and multilateral international law in enabling and constraining global capitalism across time. The investigation looks backwards so as to think forward. The larger endeavor is to imagine how an Asian law-based capitalism might continue past trends, recreating continuities despite a professed desire to be different. Just as capitalism locked in the colonial features despite the shift to multilateral international law, capitalism may again be a force sustaining the very features of the Western Liberal International Order that China seeks to escape.
When and How to Legally Challenge Globalization: A Comment on the German Constitutional Court’s False Promise, International Journal of Constitutional Law (I•Con) 19 (1): 269-284, 2021
Forthcoming in iCon, the article criticizes both the German Constitutional Court’s controversial Weiss ruling and the reflexive response of many European lawyers to the ruling arguing that the German Constitutional Court’s recent challenge to European law supremacy, and European lawyers’ strident critique of it, misdirect the conversation we need to have. The German Constitutional Court wants us to focus on a surplus of European Union power, the European Court of Justice’s refusal to constrain it, the legal strategy of proportionality, and the goal of protecting national democracy. I defend national judicial pushback that is used to protect individual rights, democracy and the national constitutional order. But demanding a German right to proportionality review of ECB monetary policy does not further these goals. Judicial review of monetary policy, especially in a context of radical uncertainty, makes little sense. Nor is the German Court’s doctrinal focus helpful as a way to address globalization. We need a new and different conversation focused on when and how constitutional review can effectively and helpfully push back against the adverse impacts that economic globalization is creating.